Why OnLive “Can’t Possibly Work”

Posted 03/27/2009 at 12:05am | by Nathan Grayson

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Love the idea to pieces or think it flies in the face of everything PC gaming stands for, you can’t deny that OnLive’s ambitions are a bit lofty. After all, saying that you'll invite the PC back into the cool kids' club is one thing, but converting big talk into much, much bigger action is something else entirely. And according to Eurogamer’s resident tech expert, that “something else entirely” is “impossible.” Reason numero uno?
 
“To give the kind of performance OnLive is promising (720p at 60 frames-per-second) realistically its datacenters are going to require the processing equivalent of a high-end dual core PC running a very fast GPU - a 9800GT minimum, and maybe something a bit meatier depending on whether the 60fps gameplay claim works out, and which games will actually be running. That’s for every single connection OnLive is going to be handling,” said Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbetter.

But that’s still technically possible; it’d just require a subscription fee that’d make even Rumpelstiltskin go white with sheer terror. Now how about this little number?

“First of all, bear in mind that YouTube’s encoding farms take a long, long time to produce their current, offline 2MBps 30fps HD video. OnLive is going to be doing it all in real-time via a PC plug-in card, at 5MBps, and with surround sound too.”

“It sounds brilliant, but there’s one rather annoying fact to consider: the nature of video compression is such that the longer the CPU has to encode the video, the better the job it will do. Conversely, it’s a matter of fact that the lower the latency, the less efficient it can be.”

“OnLive overlord Steve Perlmen has said that the latency introduced by the encoder is 1ms. Think about that; he’s saying that the OnLive encoder runs at 1000fps. It’s one of the most astonishing claims I’ve ever heard. It’s like Ford saying that the new Fiesta’s cruising speed is in excess of the speed of sound.”

Hit the link to see Leadbetter’s solution to OnLive’s colossal conundrum. Even with that in mind, though, the rub of it all remains the same: OnLive seems a little too good to be true.